Article archive
Published news and blog articles, organized by category. Browse older coverage by month or search for a topic. Undated blog guides appear after dated news.
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What desertification teaches us about the world
Desertification reveals a general systems lesson: environmental change is produced through feedback among climate, ecology, infrastructure, institutions, and unequal choices.
What soil ecosystems teach us about the world
Soil ecosystems offer a general lesson in how the world works: stability is assembled from relationships, feedback, history, and many small processes that remain easy to overlook.
What the jet stream teaches us about the world
The jet stream offers a lesson in connected systems: an invisible, shifting flow links weather, travel, energy exchange, infrastructure, and the limits of prediction.
El Niño and La Niña explained: the ideas that matter
The essential ENSO ideas are simple enough to teach and subtle enough to misuse: anomaly, feedback, teleconnection, timescale, and probability are the vocabulary for reading the pattern without turning it into a slogan.
How El Niño and La Niña work
El Niño and La Niña are not isolated weather events but phases of a coupled Pacific system, where winds, warm water, pressure, and distant weather patterns push one another around the planet.
How monsoons work
A monsoon is not simply a season of heavy rain. It is a continent-scale circulation that reverses with the seasons as land, ocean, pressure, and moisture trade roles.
How permafrost works
Permafrost is ground that stays at or below freezing for at least two years, but its behavior depends on seasonal thaw, ice, water, soil, microbes, and the heat moving through a changing landscape.
Monsoons explained: the ideas that matter
Five ideas organize the subject: seasonal reversal, pressure gradients, moisture transport, feedback, and variability. Together they explain why monsoons are predictable in outline but uncertain in detail.
Permafrost explained: the ideas that matter
The clearest way to understand permafrost is to separate the definition, the active layer, the ice, the carbon, the landscape response, and the human systems that depend on frozen ground.
The engineering challenge behind El Niño and La Niña
Forecasting ENSO is an engineering problem as much as a scientific one: the observing system must sample a moving ocean, the models must couple different physics, and decisions must remain useful before uncertainty disappears.
The engineering challenge behind monsoons
Designing for monsoon regions means engineering with a variable water machine: intense pulses, long dry intervals, shifting rivers, saturated ground, and uncertain extremes.
The engineering challenge behind permafrost
Building on permafrost means managing a ground-temperature problem as well as loads, water, ice, settlement, maintenance, and uncertainty—because a foundation can change the frozen system it depends on.
The hidden history of El Niño and La Niña
The history of ENSO is a story of local observation, global measurement, changing scientific language, and repeated surprises that turned a seasonal Pacific current into a planetary climate pattern.
The hidden history of monsoons
Monsoons are ancient climate rhythms, but the word, the measurements, and the scientific picture are products of trade, empire, instruments, and expanding global observation.
The hidden history of permafrost
Permafrost is both a deep-time archive and a modern scientific category: its layers preserve traces of past environments, while people and researchers have learned to read, travel across, build on, and monitor frozen ground.
What El Niño and La Niña teach us about the world
ENSO is a lesson in connected systems: local conditions can be produced by distant forces, useful forecasts can remain uncertain, and resilience depends on institutions that learn faster than the pattern changes.
What monsoons teach us about the world
Monsoons show how a planetary system becomes local reality: oceans set the supply, mountains redirect it, institutions distribute risk, and small timing changes can reshape a season.
What permafrost teaches us about the world
Permafrost reveals a general systems lesson: what looks stable can depend on a narrow balance of heat, water, structure, memory, and time—and change can accelerate when the hidden supports are removed.
Atmospheric rivers explained: the ideas that matter
To understand atmospheric rivers, keep four ideas distinct but connected: water vapor, transport, lifting, and impact. The distinctions make forecasts clearer and prevent a weather label from becoming a shortcut for every consequence.
How atmospheric rivers work
Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow corridors that move large amounts of water vapor through the atmosphere, where winds, mountains, and temperature turn transport into rain or snow.
How mangrove forests work
Mangrove forests turn tidal motion, salt-tolerant plants, muddy sediments, and dense root networks into a living coastal system that filters flows and creates habitat.
How the water cycle works
The water cycle is a connected set of phase changes and pathways that moves water among ocean, atmosphere, land, ice, groundwater, and living systems.
Mangrove forests explained: the ideas that matter
Mangrove forests become easier to understand when five layers stay connected but distinct: plants, roots, sediment, tidal flows, and the wider coastal community.
The engineering challenge behind atmospheric rivers
Preparing for atmospheric rivers is an engineering problem in a moving, uncertain system: infrastructure must absorb pulses of water while forecasts, terrain, reservoirs, and communities interact.
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